Drunk, disruptive and often pantsless; never has there been a more disorderly college mascot than…
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Actually, it was The Tree's media representative who fired off the missive (at 1:30 a.m.). Turns out that the girls in the photo were not cheerleaders, but in fact Stanford band members posing as cheerleaders. And the photo was taken at ... the Special Olympics? Read on.

Hi-diddly-ho neighborino,

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It's the folks from the Stanford Band, that organization that effortlessly blends punk pop, sousaphones and pants dropping into a homogeneous creamy mixture, here to say that we saw your entry on the Tree today and we thought we could provide the appropriate context for this rogue photo, for as you know, the Tree is actually the mascot of the Band.

First off, We (or perhaps I is more appropriate, let's drop the Leitch-esque use of the royal we) are big fans of Deadspin. I love Deadspin like a fat kid loves cake. HOW-EVA, STEPHEN A. SMITH IS HERE TO SAY THAT YOUR APPROACH TO THE TREE NEEDS MORE NUANCE. You see, the Tree is like Che Guevara with bling on, he's complex. He leads a high-stress life, filled with enemies out to get him after they found out about the Rolexes and the Lexus and that he was blowin' up like nitro. Sometimes he needs to unwind, which may attribute to his/her past indiscretions, but is not at the root of this current image which indubitably was lifted from the Tree's Facebook profile. Now I know you understand my flow, so here we go.

From the looks of the surroundings, my best estimate is that that picture was taken at the 2007 Marin Country Special Olympics, who invited the Band to provide a funk-laden rockin' soundtrack to these athletes. They appreciated our boogieing so much, the local newspaper even wrote an article about it (Lookit Martha! We's in thu paypurs!). It's not as illicit is it may initially appear. In fact, our drum major just needed a visual illustration of the Krebs cycle for his Human Biology problem set, and the Tree and Dollies were more than willing to oblige. That's all that picture is. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

Also, and listen close because this part is the most important, as much as I love Deadspin posts with the cheerleader tag (and believe me do I ever) I would have to petition you to remove it from this photo. You see, those fetching lasses depicted are not cheerleaders at all. In fact, they are 3 of the Dollies, the Band's 5 woman dance team/ninja commando strike force. They only perform in a dance and/or roundhouse kick capacity, so as you can see, they are definitely not cheerleaders. The only way they resemble Stanford's designated cheerleaders is that neither of them actually lead cheers.

Finally, while nothing I can say will ever truly convince you. I can say that by and large most of the times when you see the tree he is not, in fact, schwasted, schmammered, nor even schipsy. Before every football game and basketball game, the Tree now has to take a breathalyzer test, and of course pass it. Funny story about that though, for our reunion game against TCU we had about 8 or so returning Trees, with their costumes and everything. That morning they had partaken in the Breakfast of Champions (aka beer and donuts) as well as some light post-BoC drinking, unbeknownst that a breathalyzer ambush awaited them as they entered the stadium. Twas a sad day when most of them were denied entry into the game, and made doubly sad by the fact that the entire ordeal took so long that we had no chance to do our pregame show that we spent hours on, listening to people in towers tell us how much we were messing it up. We almost didn't have time to play the Star Spangled Banner. That would have been a fine how-do-you-do. I tell you this story merely to illustrate what happens when our mission of rocking out and bringing the funk run up against stodgy administrators. It's veritably out of a college movie! Maybe a bra bomb would loosen them up a little.

Also, this story shows that maybe we should keep this picture on the d/l. If word got out that we were having S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N, they might just close down our Sex Cauldron once and for all.

Finally, know that this letter is primarily a procrastination technique, to avoid doing my problem set, but feel free to post any of it on your interwebs.